The end of the job? The end of the office? Self-employment for all? Or a return to jobs for life? n

JOKES show the way the wind blows. Office supply shops do a good trade in comic cards to stick up behind reception desks, with slogans like: "This firm only hires slave labour", "Before you ask, the answer is No" and "We like the simple things in life... Money". The same cards have appealed to the same defensive sense of humour for the past 50 years.

The 21st century is only five years away. Most of the people who'll be at work in its first three decades are already out there, working. Any forecast of the future of work needs to remember that the people it's dealing with aren't very different from the way they always were. As one computer software specialist told me, when he heard I was writing this article, "Social anthropology is more important than technology."

For a recent study, the left-of-centre think-tank, Demos, got together a large pile of futurological books. "They were almost all rubbish," says Geoff Mulgan, the think-tank's director. The big weakness is the tendency to ignore how long it takes for innovation to penetrate. As James Woudhuysen, consultant in information technology (IT) at the Henley Centre for Forecasting, points out, "IT breakthroughs have been the subject of high hopes in the past," yet by the start of the 21st century "human beings will still outnumber the world's industrial robots by 6,000 to one."

If you want to map out the best way to survive the 21st century, you'll need to balance the rival snail's-eye and bird's-eye views of the shape of work to come. In the United States last year, out of $1,500 billion's worth of goods sold by retailers, only about one dollar in every 7,500 was shelled out by customers who used interactive on-line shopping. Future watchers might say that it still came to about $200 million's worth. Sociology watchers would say that habits change slowly, and human nature hardly at all.

The big success story of retailing, for example, is not one which avoids face-to-face dealings in favour of a video screen. It is the shopping mall. In Britain, despite belated restrictive efforts by John Gummer, the Environment Secretary, malls are spreading like a bush fire. The atmosphere at the Metro Centre at Gateshead, or at Lakeside in Thurrock, Essex, is in the direct line of descent from Blackpool's Pleasure Beach, built in the Thirties as Neville Chamberlain's Holidays With Pay Act created a new Wakes Week leisure class. The main delivery system in malls is the car, invented more than 100 years ago. Only the stock control is governed by IT.

"Most of the inventions that will shape the 21st century have, almost certainly, already been invented," says Peter Hall, Professor of Planning at University College, London. He is a celebrated and percipient forecaster of the future of cities. Currently, he is researching the way cities are shaped by innova- tion, both cultural and technological. "The trouble is, we probably don't know what use will be made of innovations. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he thought its main use would be to play music to selected subscribers." Only now, in Britain, is the telephone attaining its full power (this depended on its reaching very nearly all homes), as witness the stunning success of Direct Line insurance and First Direct banking. But, paradoxically, this does not diminish the importance of human interaction. Such firms have discovered how much it matters that the person at the other end - almost always a woman - has the right kind of voice.

So what inventions should the would-be century survivor bet on? "Despite all the hype," Hall says, "my money would still be on the global information super-highway. It's not a flash in the pan. Enormous amounts of sophisticated data will be there, on demand, through cable or other forms of transmission. It will create huge `publishing' industries in both culture and education. The growth of higher education and entertainment has gone on through the worst depression in 50 years. Barring some holocaust, it will continue."

But this doesn't mean that your best move is to become an all-out computer whizz. What economists call the "transactional costs" of these new businesses are very high. "If you have an economy based on networks - creative people doing creative things - you have constant difficulties in relating the parts to the whole," Professor Hall says. "The best thing is to be a lawyer or an accountant. Lawyers will be everywhere. There is constant litigation. Money relations become very complex. You need ever- subtler accounting systems to make the best use of the system."

Some aspects of the future sound, as always, much like the past. Nor does Hall agree with those who think we shall all be working in little tele-cottages, scattered across the face of Britain. "Theoretically, IT means you can do anything anywhere. But you can't meet people that way, and you've got to be around. Cities may spread out into city regions, but Silicon Valley didn't spring up in the middle of nowhere. It was on the edge of the San Francisco city region. I think of flourishing small consultancies, 15 miles north of Cambridge - but the people who work there can be in London in an hour, at Heathrow in an hour and a bit, at Stansted in less."

"So many forecasts," Geoff Mulgan says, at Demos, "are straight-line predictions, which forget that present trends don't always continue." In a recent book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Professor Henry Mintzberg, of McGill University, Montreal, notes wryly that there is no way of predic- ting "discontinuities".

In other words, things can change very suddenly; the arrival of the Aids epidemic and the collapse of communism are two classic recent examples. Or people can see what's happening and change their own lives. As Robert Brown, of PA Consulting, says, "We are not rabbits frozen in the headlights of the future." The unpredictable dips and rises in the birth rate show that the strongest pressures on the labour market derive from what two people do alone together in bed.

Pay no attention to government forecasts about jobs. All official attempts to plan for future manpower needs have struck the rocks. The planners end up with too many teachers, too few doctors. You don't want to be on the wrong side of such advice. We are constantly told, for example, that industry needs more engineers, both male and female. But engineering graduates routinely go off into other careers because, they will tell you, British industry is (a) still so unwelcoming to graduates, (b) in seemingly terminal decline. Will the 21st century change this?

Hardly anyone expects manufacturing suddenly to start to burgeon again. "Brawn has ceased to have economic value," is how Richard Layard, director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, puts it. But Patrick Minford, the monetarist economist at Liverpool University and one of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's group of "wise men," thinks that a brawn- less form of manufacturing will revive. This is partly because of Britain's "huge supply of unskilled workers". He notes that "the present export boom has focused on manufacturing. Lots of jobs are being created in the car industry, in Samsung and Sony, in pharmaceuticals. The fastest- growing part of the economy is part-time women on low wages." The prime example from popular fiction is Joanna Trollope's rector's wife in her supermarket job. Not, perhaps, how you want to use your own talents on the other side of the millennium? More cheerfully, Professor Minford adds health services, both public and private, to Peter Hall's forecast of education, the arts and entertainment as areas of growth.

Can the management gurus help you plot a way through? At Demos, Mulgan is sceptical. He sees them as "part of the entertainment business, though some of them are very good at it." Tom Peters and William Bridges are two of the top fliers. Bridges's new book, Jobshift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs, was published in Britain last month. For him, 100 per cent of jobs are now temporary. He foresees an economy made up of "vendor workers", selling their services to clients on short-term projects.

This is, by now, the conventional wisdom about the way of work in the 21st century. Charles Handy is the only British-based management author to have made it to guru status. He's been called "the nearest we have to a philosopher of business". His new book, The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future, was reprinted 11 times after its publication last year. The image in Handy's title relates to the risk of ending up doing work you feel is meaningless. He writes, and talks, with more charm than most. (He was born in County Kildare, after all.) Instead of vendor workers, he talks of "portfolio" workers. You carry your skills around with you, and build up a pleasant, profitable package of jobs, just like a successful film star, freelance journalist - or management guru. "Loyalty will be first to one's own career, then to one's profession and only thirdly to the employer." There will be "lots of customers, but not lots of jobs". In the quest for those customers, you'll have to run your entire life as a business. ("You & Co." is William Bridges's phrase.)

One in eight of the British workforce is now officially self-employed. This is often seen as endorsing the Handy-Bridges prescription. But is it really where to put your money? It hides a multitude of realities. Wendy Hirsh, of the Institute of Employment Studies, Sussex University, says the new trend is "fun for the few": "There's a world of difference between being a part-time consultant and a part-time cleaner, and at the moment the self-employed tend to be among the lowest 10 per cent of paid workers." In the harsh world of business power, the firms with whom self- employed "contractors" make their deals nearly always have the whip hand, especially during hard times. "Life," in Handy's own words, "is a struggle for many and a puzzle for most."

Take the BBC as a warning. One of the biggest shifts to contractual work has taken place here. Is the BBC, originally a classic creation of the security-conscious 1920s, a model of the way things will be in the fragmented 2020s? People who would once have been offered a steady job now find themselves on recurrent, extremely short-term contracts. They lose out all round. They are taxed at source through PAYE (and so miss the tax benefits of true freelance work). But the BBC has shed all its obligations to fund pensions, maternity leave or any other employer duties. Equal opportunities campaigners have welcomed the changes. The new, cheapskate way of work means more women and more Asian broadcasters (still not many West Indians). But it is an equality of precariousness.

Can this workplace strategy continue? In the shortish run, perhaps. But, as Mulgan says, "Many people's psychology is not suited to it." In the longer run, sociology raises its head; in particular the Machiavellian wisdom of the Italian sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto. There will always be lites, Pareto says, but there will always be a turnover. The people he calls "lions" are best suited to maintaining the status quo in stable conditions; but the "foxes" - more adaptive and innovative - do better in times of change. The early 21st century looks like being a time for foxes. But human nature has never fancied perpetual fluctuation. The chances are that new structures of work will emerge. Security will be prized again, above flexibility.

The Henley Centre's forecasters note that, in 1979, 43 per cent of employment in Britain was in businesses with more than 500 people on their payroll. By 1989, the proportion was down to 34 per cent. By the year 2000, it is projected to fall to 27 per cent. But every downward curve can have a turning.

"People I know still hanker after empire-building," says Michael Willmott, the centre's deputy chairman. "Status and power turn on the number reporting to you. It may be difficult to break this." The 19th century began as a mercantile war of all against all: classic economic liberalism. It ended with the creation of industrial cartels and systems of public control - the innovations which are currently in decay. The cycle is sure to start again.

Michael Young is the author of The Rise of the Meritocracy and Britain's most distinguished sociologist. A meritocracy is what we increasingly have. Many would bet on it continuing. But today Young says he is "most interested in the reaction against individualism." It could "take the form of stronger governments, stronger companies." In his view, "The obvious trouble with the Charles Handy prescription is that you end up with 10 per cent of the population too busy, and 20 or 30 per cent with no work at all. The meritocracy is becoming horribly true, in a way I hadn't foreseen. The powerful people are those who can understand the system."

He thinks that the children who have been brought up in such an insecure world will, when they grow up, force through new changes. "What good can it be for people to be so knocked about, whether they're rich or poor? They may turn against the idea of productivity at any price, and go for less mobility of labour again."

This prediction takes you well into the mid-years of the 21st century. How you use it depends on your time-scale. The younger you are, the more it matters.

Not that all sociologists take the same line. In his contentious new book, The Bell Curve, the American sociologist Charles Murray forecasts a hardening of the meritocratic divide. The intelligent will marry the intelligent. The rest will sink into a genetic Slough of Despond. Spurred on by widespread attacks, The Bell Curve has sold a quarter of a million copies. Talking to Murray, I find him less ferocious than his published words: he says he wants to give back to brawn some of its lost esteem. But even Michael Young (whom Murray admires) says that "the hypothesis of people who are genetically on the down side is much more plausible now."

As Mulgan observes, the real jobs revolution is in the middle. The computer destroys swathes of middling jobs, while "many jobs at the bottom and top of the scale remain relatively unchanged: the manual services of cleaning, cooking and caring on the one hand, and the jobs of top civil servants, lawyers and even business people on the other." Not long ago, in a tyre factory, I talked to a workman who was delighted that no foreman came round any longer, checking that everything was done to specification. Now he just looked at a computer screen on his own workbench. For the production director, the change meant he could check the progress of computer-monitored work direct. No middle man. This is not only happening in factories. In banks and building societies, thousands of middle-ranking jobs have gone. The most depressing day I spent recently was in an "executive job centre". I was talking to managers in their forties and early fifties, thrown out of jobs with companies they had begun with at 16. They had only one skill, and nobody wanted it.

For this new world of work, Charles Handy says, we must teach people "the ability to generate activity on their own account, and also how to sell themselves". It's a question, he tells me, of "investing in intelligence". School should be "reorganised around exploring questions that haven't yet been answered; knowledge is easy enough to obtain, through computer screens." This must start early. "Fourteen is too late. The first 10 years are what define your characteristics - plus, of course, what your parents expect of you." Michael Willmott, at the Henley Centre, says: "The need for children to get on well at school becomes even more important. The chances of social mobility, through jobs, will diminish." Attitudes may be more important in the millennial world than precise skills. "Learn how to communicate," says Mulgan. "Do voluntary work, not just homework. But don't forget to acquire basic numeracy."

David Hargreaves, Professor of Education at Cambridge, is an iconoclast. Teachers are one group whose tight grip on their jobs he would like to prise away. "All teachers should be on five-year renewable contracts and performance-related pay," he wrote in a recent Demos pamphlet. (I assume he includes professors.) He is studying how doctors are trained. The most important part, he reckons, is after they have qualified, when they are working alongside other doctors. In a humbler context, this is derided as "sitting by Nellie". But Har- greaves thinks we set too much store by "qualifications" - GCSEs and NVQs. On-the-job training is better, he thinks. In an augury for the 21st century, First Direct agrees. It prefers people who've dealt with customers in shops, rather than people who come from banks. Its chief executive says: "We recruit from behavioural skills rather than banking skills, because you can acquire banking skills through training."

Geoff Mulgan recently listed his own forecasts of the growth trades for the 21st century. They include: advertising, design, corporate entertainment, recycling, security - and escort services. But in the United States, the most profitable "bulletin board" on the information super-highway - the so-called Internet - is "Event Horizons". The pictures it offers include a huge catalogue of pornographic images. Perhaps even escort services will be on the way out. The beginning of wisdom about the coming years is to remember that nothing is certain.